The /s/ Sound

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The /s/ is a sound from the ‘Consonants Pairs’ group and it is called the ‘Voiceless alveolar sibilant’. This means that you create friction through clenched teeth by directing air flow with the tip of the tongue.

The /s/ sound is made through the mouth and it is Unvoiced which means that you don't use your vocal chords to make the sound.
It is defined by shape of your teeth and the position of your tongue and it is a Sibilant, which is a sound made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the sharp edge of the teeth.
To produce the sound clench your teeth together lightly and put your tongue just behind them restricting airflow to a narrow channel over the tongue and through the teeth. Then push air though the channel and through the teeth.

This video is part of our series on phonetics and pronunciation for learners of English as a foreign language.

Phonetics is the science of pronunciation. It can be helpful for people learning English because one of the most difficult things about the language is the spelling and pronunciation. English is not very phonetic and as a result the same letters are often pronounced in many different ways in different words.
The IPA helps by providing a way to write words as they are pronounced. The normal alphabet only has 26 characters but there are 44 different sounds that are used to pronounce words. As well as that, most word in English originate from other languages like Greek, Latin and French to name just a few and in many cases the the language of origin influences how the word is pronounced.
The IPA provides a symbol (phoneme) for each sound so the correct pronunciation can be written or printed in dictionaries.

This video along with the others in our pronunciation series helps language learners to hear the correct pronunciation and also to know how to produce the sound of each phoneme.